Von Duprin Automates Material Flow

Von Duprin Inc. (Indianapolis, Ind.), a manufacturer of industrial door parts, has achieved two impressive goals by implementing a new material flow system: a reduction in inventory and a streamlining of the entire manufacturing process.

The company's previous system used manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) to schedule production. Racks and shelves stored parts, with carts and lift trucks supplying needed material to workstations. With a high number of orders, there were thousands of different part combinations, making it easier for people, rather than materials, to move between workstations. However, with no real-time materials tracking in place, the accuracy of locating parts was only about 90%, according to Jerry Hein, Von Duprin's process owner, manufacturing and business process engineering.

After analyzing the company's existing manufacturing process, Von Duprin executives made three key decisions:

Materials, not workers, would move between workstations, and materials would move only once for each value-added operation.
Inventory levels would not exceed a five-day supply.
Production would be based on make-to-order, rather than make-to-inventory.

Von Duprin chose a mini-load Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS) from Eskay Corp. (Salt Lake City, Utah), a supplier of automated material handling systems. The single-aisle AS/RS has become Von Duprin's materials control center, delivering needed parts directly to adjacent workstations. It has reduced assembly cycle times, increased productivity 57% and improved accuracy to better than 99.99%, according to Hein. The company has also cut inventory levels by 65%.

Von Duprin uses the mini-load to deliver raw materials, subassemblies and small assembly components directly to adjacent workstations for completion. Besides the AS/RS, Eskay also designed and installed seven Use-Point-Manager (UPM) workstations spaced along the length of the mini-load to receive inventory from side-of-aisle drop-off points. Real-time software controls the storage and retrieval system, inventory and deliveries to the workstations.

The new material flow system has substantially reduced the time and distance materials must travel. Materials move directly into controlled buffers at the point-of-use, and employees can control their own workflow by calling for immediate, high-speed delivery of subassemblies.

"Much more than just dealing with inventory and product variability, we have developed a new control technology for manufacturing," Hein observed.

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